Spreadsheet Selves

is a student of history at the University of St. Andrews, and a freelance journalist.

Don’t forget to tune into the Hinternet livestream later today, 20:30 Paris / 19:30 London / 14:30 NY / 11:30 Rio Linda. and JSR will be discussing Paleolithic art, the moon, and other things that make us human.

Introduction

At some point between 9:30 and 11:00 CEST, on 9 October, 2025, I presented my talk, “Against The Gutenberg Parenthesis”, a critique of CUNY Professor Emeritus Jeff Jarvis’ 2022 monograph “The Gutenberg Parenthesis”. As I paced the carpeted floor of the Sala De Juntas, second floor of the Facultad de Educación, Filosofía y Antropología of the University of the Basque Country, my purpose to puncture Jarvis’s techno-boosterist balloon. You see, his book purports that we have arrived at the end of the era of the printed word, the Gutenberg Parenthesis, which, Danish scholar Lars Ole Sauerberg argues, began with the printing press and ended with the internet.

Jarvis’s book does not mourn the print era. In fact, he traces the history of all those who railed against the corrupting influence of print, including several popes, and links them to the “moral panic[s]” of Nokia-toting naysayers today.1 He is keen on the new age of the Digital, and continues to argue that it democratises the public sphere.

I am not so keen.

Like the stereotypical Boomer, I do not like what the stereotypical kids are doing. Except, in a non-stereotypical way, I am actually a kid myself, not only in spirit, but quite literally I, Simon Ezra-Jackson, am well within the age cohort known as Generation Z. I’m halfway through my undergrad. In fact, I think people in my generation, who grew up online, are far more suspicious of flashy chatbots than our parents’ generation. I will level this charge against Jarvis, whose response and/or proposals for collaboration I would gladly welcome.

Jarvis’s problem, I argued in the carpeted Sala de Juntas, during my presentation at the UNESCO-sponsored XVI International Ontology Congress earlier this October, is not that he’s wrong — but only that he’s a Boomer. You see, part of Jarvis’s argument is that the first adopters of any major technological shift in knowledge-production are honorary Boomers (like me). Take Gutenberg himself. Even if he came tolling the death knell of the manuscript tradition, Gutenberg himself remained mentally stuck in the “scribes’ age”